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Archive for May 2009

This Week CP Survey -- As Apt to Current Day Chennai (India) IT Environment

This week's 'The CodeProject' survey on Have you written a program for a friend or relative, and would you again? with the underlying thought like "Whether you've written something for free to help a mate, or done some consulting work for your significant other's significant other - would you do it again or should friends and work not mix?" seems to be applying perfectly for these Chennai (Tamil Nadu) IT circle environment at least with a number of people that I have met.

At least in this part of India, we can see people trying to derive maximum advantage of you, sucking blood as much they can by paying you peanuts (or even trying to avoid that to the maximum). The interesting part is that they would try visiting you again shamelessly time and again for the same benefit. I just thought I can share a few honorary circles that befit this bill and some of the good treatments/retaliations that either me and/or my friends have given them whenever they confront.

At first I just thought I would try suppressing the names but then I just thought I should narrate it diplomatically so that many other people can be saved from such miscreants trapping them.

Problem: There was a guy called 'Syed Albeez' who was trying to bug and pester me and a lot of friends circle harvesting the phone numbers from the job sites. He wanted us to give free software development for his organization. When my friend scheduled a visit to his office about a couple of years back, he was offering full time employment and the salary he was willing to pay was like 84 USD per month.

Workaround: My friend challenged him for a business deal and he just escaped into the wild and no say from him or no email replies from thereon.

Problem: One of the person from my previous organization called Francis**, who worked there in the Human Resources department resigned there around 2003. I admit that he was instrumental in me joining during the 2001 recession but at the same time there is a limit to the gratitude and the help he can expect from me.

About three years back he was asking me some loan guarantor signature for about ten lakhs because he was starting up a new business. Till then, there was no email communication. A well-wisher strongly objected and he told not to venture such deals with him since he sounds more or less like an esoterically hysteric character and there are more chances of he running away amuck. Without being in touch with so long and contacting some one only for the sake of benefit is kind of sounding a very selfish attitude and sounds to be opportunistic. The person who guided me against helping him was perfectly true in his speculation. He didn't seem to venture into any business.

About an year later, he was again calling a number of guys since he was working in some US call center night shift and it to recruit .NET programmers.Workaround: Again, when we took the help of the same well-wisher, he just asked us to 'brush him off'.

About a week back, he wrote me a big message in the subject of email 'This is Francis. Can you give your contact number?'. When I wrote him back 'Why?', he was replying that he is working in some company called 'Trenchant Financial Technologies' and recruiting .NET developers again. He wanted me to do some free advertising in forums ("crop dusting forums with dirty crap about job posting for his shabby shack).Workaround: This time we thought we would have some summer cool fun with him besides to test whether he has some social sense. I asked him whether he can donate funds for philanthropic causes. I am associated with a few animal welfare organizations and Sri Ramakrishna Mutt. I just thought I would try to make him contribute there too. He replied furiously "What donations? I give donations to church. My father gives donations". The interesting part is that his English is so much broken. I am just trying to think, if I can gather all the entire set of conversations into a single PDF with Zoho entitled as 'Fun with Francis' and put it on Scribd so that at least readers can have some fun time reading it besides getting a social enlightenment on such crooked people.

[**Name truncated or might have been changed to preserve the privacy of the person. The purpose of the post is to serve as an eye-opener for the community to be wary of bad apples and not to crib/complaint against any person.]

I hence thought I would share this topic on my technical weblog for the benefit of IT fraternity to be wary of such underworld people spread amongst us.